Carnegie Museum of Natural History

One of the Four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

Dinosaurs

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Ask a Scientist – How Are Birds Like Dinosaurs?

How are birds like dinosaurs? Assistant Curator of Birds, Chase Mendenhall, and Urban Bird Conservation Coordinator, Jonathan Rice, introduce the bird collection in the latest Ask a Scientist. Learn how the Section of Birds works with paleontologists to understand dinosaur behavior.

Ask a Scientist is a video series where we ask our research staff questions about the millions of amazing objects and specimens stored in our museum collection. Tune in on YouTube, and submit your own questions via Twitter @CarnegieMNH!

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Meet The Newest Addition To The Fossil Vertebrate Collection

by Amy Henrici

mammoth tooth from the side
The new mammoth tooth as viewed from the side. The crown, or exposed part, of the tooth is at the top, and the root is at the bottom.

The Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History acquires fossils in a variety of ways, most commonly through field work by Section staff, exchanges with other museums, donations, or (very rarely) purchases. The most recent addition to the collection came by way of a donation.

Gary Kirsch discovered the tooth shown above in a sand-gravel bar of a central Ohio stream in 1988 while collecting sediment samples. He had set his sampling equipment on the sand-gravel bar and was moving between the bar and the stream collecting samples. During one of his many forays, Gary noticed an edge of the tooth sticking out of the bar and pulled it out. It was covered in mud, which he quickly cleaned off in the stream to reveal the beautifully preserved tooth, which he identified as that of a mammoth.

Gary recently emailed photographs of the tooth to Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Matt Lamanna because he wanted to donate it to the museum. Acceptance of his generous offer required some research: mammoth and Asian elephant teeth are very similar, and because none of the Section staff are experts in fossils of Pleistocene (Ice Age) mammals, we reached out to Pleistocene expert Blaine Schubert at East Tennessee State University, who often uses our collection, to verify Gary’s identification. Blaine was certain that it was a mammoth tooth because an Asian elephant tooth could only have come from a zoo or circus animal, which was highly unlikely. Blaine was curious about how teeth of the two species are distinguished, so he forwarded the photographs to an elephant expert at his university, Chris Widga.

mammoth tooth from the top
The grinding (i.e., lower, occlusal) surface of the tooth, showing the fairly crenulated tooth enamel.

Chris determined that the tooth is the first (forward-most) molar from the left upper jaw, and because it has fairly crenulated enamel, that it is from a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). Through comparison with tooth eruption and wear schedules (sequences) of modern elephants, Chris concluded that the animal was in its late teens to early 20s when it died. In the wild, modern elephants generally live to about their mid-50s, so this single specimen offers a window into mammoth mid-life.

The Section is grateful to Gary for his thoughtful donation. The specimen will be put on temporary display soon in the PaleoLab window on the first floor of the museum for public viewing.

Amy Henrici is the collection manager for the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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The Two-Headed Dinosaur

Apatosaurus is a sauropod, or long-necked plant-eating dinosaur, that lived in western North America during the late Jurassic Period roughly 150 million years ago. In the early 20th century, scientists couldn’t agree on what kind of head Apatosaurus had. No skull had ever been found attached to a neck of this dinosaur. So, when Carnegie Museum of Natural History mounted its most complete Apatosaurus skeleton in 1915, it did so without including a skull.

Apatosaurus louisae (right) as it was originally mounted in 1915, without a skull. At left is the skeleton of its relative Diplodocus carnegii.
Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae (right) as it was originally mounted in 1915, without a skull. At left is the skeleton of its relative Diplodocus carnegii, better known as ‘Dippy.’ Credit: Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The mount stood headless until 1932, when the museum followed prevailing scientific opinion of the day and placed a blunt-snouted, broad-toothed skull on the Apatosaurus. It remained there for another 47 years.

Apatosaurus and Diplodocus skeletons
Apatosaurus (right) and Diplodocus, ca. 1932, after a skull of the blunt-snouted sauropod Camarasaurus lentus had been mounted on the Apatosaurus skeleton. Credit: Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

In 1978, however, Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist Dave Berman and museum research associate Jack McIntosh reasoned that a very different, more Diplodocus-like skull found with the Apatosaurus skeleton back in 1910 was most probably the correct one. A subsequent discovery of a still-connected Apatosaurus skull and neck proved them correct. In 1979, the museum’s Apatosaurus louisae was finally fitted with its proper skull – more than seven decades after its discovery! It remains that way today, on public exhibit in the museum’s dinosaur gallery, Dinosaurs in Their Time.

Apatosaurus Louise
Apatosaurus as it looks today, displayed with its correct skull, which closely resembles that of its relative, Diplodocus. Credit: Melinda McNaugher, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Matt Lamanna is a paleontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.  Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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Time Travel… No Flux Capacitor Required

drawing of the dinosaur crossing a stream in its natural habitat
The newly discovered meat-eating dinosaur Tratayenia rosalesi crosses a stream in what is now northern Patagonia, Argentina some 85 million years ago.
Credit: Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

By Matt Lamanna

I’m a child of the 1980s. When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was Back to the Future, where Doc Brown turns a car into a time machine that sends Marty McFly into the past. I’d watch that movie and think, “How cool would it be if time travel were real?” We could go back in time and, say, hear Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address, or watch Michelangelo paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We could gaze in wonder at the Great Pyramid under construction, marvel at a herd of passing mammoths, or witness a ‘Lucy’-like creature take humanity’s first steps. We could even go all the way back to the Mesozoic Era – the Age of Dinosaurs.

Sadly—spoiler alert!—time travel is still not possible, at least not in the literal way that the creators of Back to the Future imagined. But there is another way to see dinosaurs in the flesh. One only needs a talented artist.

Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to have worked with many artists to (virtually) bring dinosaurs and other extinct creatures back to life. From my old buddy the ‘Wookiee’ Jason Poole, to dynamic husband-and-wife duo Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger, to dino-sculptors extraordinaire Dan Pickering, Gary Staab, and Bruce Mohn, to rising stars Taylor Maggiacomo and Lindsay Wright, and others, each of these gifted natural history artists has graciously shared their time and talent to help my scientific collaborators and I breathe life into ancient bones.

Two artists deserve special mention here. For more than a decade, from 2004 to 2015, I was blessed to be able to work with Mark Klingler, the long-time Scientific Illustrator here in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Section of Vertebrate Paleontology. Mark and I worked together to give the world its first look at many new fossil discoveries, such as the semi-truck-sized dinosaur Sarmientosaurus, the bizarre ‘Chicken from Hell’ Anzu, and the ~120 million-year-old bird Gansus.

Mark gave the museum and I one final gift prior to his departure in 2015: he hosted an intern, Andrew McAfee, then a newly minted graduate of the Science Illustration program at Cal State University Monterey Bay. Andrew continued to volunteer at the museum after Mark left, and did such a fantastic job that, in 2016, we hired him as Vertebrate Paleontology’s new Scientific Illustrator.

Like Mark before him, Andrew is meticulous when it comes to reconstructing a prehistoric species and its habitat. Case in point: our hot-off-the-presses predatory dinosaur from Patagonia, Tratayenia, which was formally announced by my Argentine collaborators and I yesterday morning. Tratayenia is a fascinating dinosaur, and was undoubtedly a terrifying beast in life, but unfortunately, we paleontologists don’t have very much of it – its fossils are pretty incomplete. So how, you ask, was Andrew able to produce the image above?

Well, he and I first had to build a picture of the dinosaur itself. Tratayenia is a megaraptorid, a group of mysterious hunters that roamed South America, Australia, and probably other Southern Hemisphere continents during the Cretaceous, the third and final time period of the Mesozoic Era. Using the bones of other megaraptorids, we made educated guesses as to what the missing pieces of the Tratayenia skeleton may have looked like. From there, we used our knowledge of the closest living relatives of dinosaurs—birds—to put meat, skin, and feathers back on the bones; in other words, to reconstruct the parts of the body that are rarely found as fossils. Finally, since we have almost no idea what color Tratayenia may have been, I encouraged Andrew to get creative here. The pattern he came up with seems suited to an animal that probably relied on stealth and camouflage to ambush its prey.

After we had Tratayenia to the point where it looked ready to jump off the screen and bite us, it was then time to put the animal back into its 85-million-year-old world. To do so, I scoured the scientific literature on the rock formation that yielded the bones of the new dinosaur, looking for clues as to what its ancient environment was like and what other species called it home. Andrew painted several of these plants and animals into his reconstruction. Look for a thigh bone of the giant herbivorous dinosaur Traukutitan and plants such as ferns, horsetails, flowering herbs, and a conifer belonging to the group Cheirolepidiaceae.

We can’t go back in time to the Age of Dinosaurs, not really at least. But through the skill and vision of natural history artists, working in tandem with paleontologists, we can catch glimpses of what these extraordinary animals and their long-vanished worlds may have been like. Andrew and I are already revving up the DeLorean for our next trip to the Mesozoic.

Matt Lamanna is a paleontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Read more about Tratayenia on Reuters.

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Did you know that the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology’s…

t. rex in Dinosaurs in their Time

Did you know that the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology’s collection contains more than 460 type, or original, specimens? Type specimens are the specimens upon which individual species are (and always will be) based.

Among these Carnegie type specimens are those of several well-known dinosaurs—Diplodocus carnegii, Apatosaurus louisae (aka ‘Brontosaurus’), and the ‘Chicken from Hell’ Anzu wyliei.

We also have the type specimen of most famous dinosaur of all, Tyrannosaurus rex!

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Dippy Across the Globe

Did you know that replicas of the skeleton of Diplodocus carnegii—most of them presented by Andrew Carnegie himself during the early 20th century—stand in major natural history museums in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Bologna (Italy), St. Petersburg (Russia), La Plata (Argentina), and Mexico City? 

Did you know that replicas of the skeleton of Diplodocus carnegii—most of them presented by Andrew Carnegie himself during the early 20th century—stand in major natural history museums in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Bologna (Italy), St. Petersburg (Russia), La Plata (Argentina), and Mexico City?

Until very recently, another replica—the first to be produced—was on display at The Natural History Museum in London.